


supersymmetry

by fealle



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Cyborgs, Drug Abuse, M/M, Mild Gore, rot/decay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-04
Updated: 2015-10-04
Packaged: 2018-04-24 17:31:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4928719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fealle/pseuds/fealle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>when he presses his cheek on his chest and finds a glowing screen, kei knows he’s touched his heart. with kuroo, you only get what you deserve.</p>
            </blockquote>





	supersymmetry

**Author's Note:**

> requested by a friend. dedicated to the lovely cosu as well, who understands. this is a cyborg krtsk au in a post-apoc setting.

 

 

**i.**

Up until he was five Kuroo had called him ‘a little creature’, with a mixture of fondness and sarcasm as he takes the boy’s hand in his own metal claws in the sinking city. In this Tokyo the rain forever falls from deadened skies and soaks the buildings with a perpetual rot that grows from the inside out, seeps into the drowning concrete and into misty windows like a noose tightening around a corpse. Very delicately, the little creature slips his human fingers onto his palm in quiet admiration and fear. Is it wrong to love a beast? Is it wrong to be infinitely fascinated about the jagged edge of a blade? Kei didn’t know the answers to that when he was younger, he observed Kuroo’s ashen skin with wide eyes that took the metal and human in him as easily as he recognizes rain and rot and loneliness to be part and parcel of this world and understood that he was a living shadow walking alongside what might as well be a rusted guillotine. When he presses his cheek on his chest and finds a glowing screen, Kei knows he’s touched his heart. With Kuroo, you only get what you deserve.

 

In his sleep Kuroo pierces the soft skin over his temple with a metal nail, and plays his thoughts into his mind, a gentle melody that plays the rain falling up into the heavens in reverse and an empty wasteland from the beginning where Kei was alone. Long before he’d met him. Long before his little palms knew how to feel their way in the dark when the lights go out. Long before his skin had started to smell of mildew and something else more frightening, like life after the denial of death.

 

 

 

  
**ii.**

He found the boy sleeping in the garbage one day, and he knew he wasn’t like the others given how he slept - curled around a soggy box like a fetus, it was a position that most of them wouldn’t attempt given how most of their spines in this side of the city had been replaced with solid titanium, steel, or something equally damning. The boy knew how to fit in the quiet curves of refuse and that fascinated Kuroo in his nightly walk in the city with his eyes glowing cold blue before turning to a more natural brown. The boy was human. All of his parts are - human.

 

It’s disappointing. He can’t smile with his broken jaw, so the least he can do was open his mouth in a paroxysm of a smile where the rot and filth of the plague runs down his metal chin in rivulets like a hungry beast. He remembers a time when he was human. Nowadays memories and dialogues flit in confused noises through his head as his brain sorts image and sound and relates them to a period of time in his life in jolts, a flash of memory like thunder in dark-grey skies: that was mortality. Flitting through the emptiness of the metallic in him like a ghost, his remembers his humanity the way some people remember venom from a snake. They wash off of him the way dirty water circles down a drain.

 

He carries the boy in his arms, no different from cradling a bird in the hand, careful not to break his bones with his metallic hands, his claws. He can sense his dreams: a panorama of images of food and something he doesn’t recognize, a vast body of water that can never be seen in this perpetually drowning city. He's long forgotten how it is to be curious, but he knows the value of images and sound and memory, and so he lays him on slab of metal and turns him to slip the needles into his spine and draw his dreams.

 

A boy has very simple dreams, Kuroo thinks. Things like wishes against the hunger and the cold and a ball to play with. Nothing different from what’s on the market already, but sometimes - and this Kuroo knows very well - sometimes the simplest of things are the ones that can injure the most, tiny little cuts over the heart that pile to become a blanket of red. Memory is a wound. Memory is a clock greased with affection and haunted with pity for wanting nothing.

 

 

 

  
**iii.**

He teaches Kei how to be a Peddler. Peddlers walk with a bag much like the doctors of old, but they have special syringes to be inserted on certain parts of the spine for drawing data to be reserved for dreams. Dreams can be anything big or small, simple or abstract; the intensity varies from REM cycle to another, from one cyborg to another, but the thing that matters the most is the illusion of experience: the ability to impart an emotion to make the heart yield, to make the circuits light up like flames. There was a revolution, once, when an angry and desperate people hoped to remove mankind’s dependency against dreams, but there’s no-one left from that movement anymore and those who were can be found hobbling along the streets with vacant eyes, chasing the empty feeling of being alive. Dreams allow people to feel. And peddlers, like fairy godmothers, promise nothing but the terms possible for empty fulfillment, in exchange for credits, thousands of credits that can be used to purchase anything if you’re careful enough.

 

They go to a popular den for that night. Kei carefully sidesteps the sleeping and the dying with their circuits thrumming through the concrete underneath his shoes like tiny earthquakes as they dream. He has a bag of vials and he’s wearing a black suit with a mask over his face as Kuroo leads him through the maze of broken little dolls. Kuroo taps a middle aged woman huddled in the corner with a ragged blanket over her, shivering, her mouth open in a silent plea. He points at her temple. “Cut here.”

 

Kei cuts on the side of her head.

 

“Alright. Now let it out - gently.” He tells him, in that ugly smile of his, “it’s just like breathing.”

 

He doesn’t know what dream she had. The brain always processes experience differently regardless of how they categorize data. But she - goes slack, something like bliss appears on her face, the lights on the side of her metallic arm buzz frantically until they settle in a slow rhythm, and she drops a stick with five hundred credits in it. Kuroo quickly scans it, and then tosses it into their bag.

 

“Easy.”

 

“… what was her dream?”

 

He shrugs. “The dead and the dying always want something strange.”

 

“And what’s that?”

 

Kuroo gives a hawking sound kind of like two blades being drawn across porcelain, which in his rotten and rusted state Kei understands to be a laugh.

 

“They always want to feel some sort of balance. When she dies she’ll finally know what that is.”

 

 

 

  
**iv.**

From what he understands with Kuroo, dreams have the ability of prolonging lives. The ones they draw from their sleeping subjects and inject to other dreamers have the capacity of awakening purpose, motivation, which keeps a person going for far longer than they should. Some people have been going on forever. Kuroo tells him, quietly, as they make their way back home, of a boy who was shorter than he was kept in a basement who dreamt of his friends and the sky for as long as he can remember. He is still underneath the concrete which little tubes feeding him dreams. Sometimes, in an effort to imitate humanity, he moves his fingers. He thinks, Kuroo said with a wry robotic tone, that he is flying.

 

Kei takes out his worn cloth and starts to grease his parts, rubbing them on his joints as he carefully helps Kuroo maintain his metal frame. Over half of his body has been built out of titanium and steel, but the steel in his spine and arms have been slowly rusting and Kei is careful to remove the flakes from his circuits. His skin has long lost its elasticity and they are drawn like canvas over his bones. He can’t feel his fingers most days. He sits beside him and tends to Kuroo like he’s done once, twice, a thousand times ever since he picked up this creature from the trash.

 

Kuroo traces the side of his jaw, his lips, with his claws.

 

Kei asks him - “do you dream?”

 

“Often.”

 

“What do you dream of?”

 

He gives him that odd metallic laugh again; he waits for his answer patiently. “Nowadays - nothing much. All I’ve ever done is work. The shitty batteries on my ass are lithium ion and they keep telling me to work and work. Even in my dreams I’m walking to work.”

 

“First person,” Kei says softly, a frown between his eyebrows. “You don’t see me in your dreams.”

 

“Am I supposed to?”

 

“There’s only the two of us in this place. I've dreamt of you more than I can remember. I think that entitles me a place in your mind, too.”

 

Kuroo looks amused. “Are you talking about recalibration?”

 

Recalibration: the process of inserting a memory into the cyborg mind in the hopes of forcing a lifetime into the already crowded cyborg mind who struggles to keep up with the exhausted human brain. It was a form of surgery with memory involving an axe with a broken handle. Kei smiles, but he shakes his head.

 

“Memory is a system,” Kei says patiently. “I want you to think of me like the way you think about rust.”

 

His fingers are calloused and warm, covered in black grease as he wipes him clean, and he leans up to kiss him with his chapped lips, but he was so human. Something about his metallic heart buzzes at the contact, but, Kuroo tells himself quietly, that’s because he’s got an old model installed in his rickety frame. No need to be so sentimental about gestures that are always so freely given among humans.

 

 

 

  
**v.**

Kei removes the lower half of his jaw with trembling fingers until Kuroo reveals a ghastly cavern of rotting bone and flesh that dripped from the metal, the smell sickly sweet from the heat and decay. Usually Kuroo does his own maintenance, but once in a while he needs help from this creature who is curious about his state, pushing his fingers into the holes where his teeth and jaw used to be; the black tar-like substance of oil and grease and chemicals that make this tin man squeak every morning. His nails sink into pinkish-grey flesh and gore.

 

“Does this hurt?” Kei asks, eyes flitting to Kuroo’s electronic ones.

 

Kuroo shakes his head. His hands settle around his waist as he continues to scrape the dead skin and bone free from the circuits that wrap around his throat.

 

“Does this hurt?” he asks again.

 

He shakes his head.

 

“It smells so bad,” Kei says. But he’s not - disgusted when he says it. He’s fascinated. He peers up into his wounds with the vicious interest of a carrion bird as he picks him clean.

 

Kei licks his fingers.

 

“Show me the rest,” he whispers.

 

Dreams rot the body. Inasmuch as the cyborg mind needs it to function beyond its means, no body has ever truly mastered the art of conquering time and gravity and no human body has ever coped with the speed of age. Metal and flesh were two opposing sides with teeth that never meet in the gaps, eating the human brain alive in between their jagged edges. If there was a thing to be said about the soul, it’s been ripped into pieces by the ever-growing need of the body to chase after one fulfilling instant after the other, and the more the mind lingers the longer the brain is forced to remember and to live.

 

Kuroo has been dreaming for a while. There had been too many modifications in his body and he looks like a wind-up human with rotting bits held up with metal toothpicks, a display case of what-have-beens with grease and chemicals and flashing lights. He can’t remember when things have fallen apart from him in such a degree that he’s forced to rely on his updates to tell him which parts of his body need to be fixed, but his form is the only one that Kei has known from childhood ever since this beast appeared to him in the rain with his clawed fingers. He kisses his metal chest, his metal thighs. His metal toes fit nicely in his mouth and he rides his metal dick well enough that the modifications in it sent him to a state of orgasm which he finds - better - than being with the very few humans that populate this sinking, drowning, rotting world. Kuroo can’t exactly feel desire, he can’t exactly discern the difference between lust and the need to replace his wires most days, but he remembers - or has incised into his mind - what eroticism was, and the things that he finds erotic are mixed with something a little bit more vicious nowadays as he introduces concepts and images into Kei’s dreams that make his claws dig into his thighs possessively.

 

Kei’s dreams right after exhausting himself are always intense, bright, and fetch a mighty credit from anyone who was feeling too - lonely. Desperate. Those who wanted to remember what it was like to sleep with a hand in the dark. At certain dens there are dreamers who know Kuroo based on how he tastes, feels, sounds in Kei’s dreams which he slips into their spine with the syringe. The feeling … is always … a little bit enlightening. Complicated, and wholly abstract from the wires that run from his spine to his head, but … enlightening.

 

Kei kisses the edge of his shoulders.

 

“We should add more appendages to your lower half, and see where that takes us.”

 

“You’re filthy,” Kuroo crows. “But then again - why not.”

 

He plucks loose tendons and skin and rotten bone from his wires. And Kuroo whispers, in both his metal and flesh mind - _why not._

 

 

 

 

**vi.**

He never told Kei this, but sometimes he feels like a costume. A costume composed of a name and different commands who wholly dreams of the world in flashes of code and what he remembers of being human, a haunted life that he’s come to terms as he’s destroyed from the high of his dreams inside out. Perhaps that’s selfish. In the scheme of things it’s not really that important for Kei to know how long has this world been sinking or rotting, but he does know that when he tells him he dreams of himself alone, with the rain moving upwards back into the skies as opposed to drowning this world with that sickening feeling of desperation and that perpetual smell of rot, he truly means that he dreams of himself alone.

 

Kei prepares the bag meticulously for the day’s work and slips the credits into their cash bag to be exchanged into supplies later on. In their run-down house he’s the only one who operates in full the way a clock moves reliably each spring. Kuroo watches him with glassy eyes and his claws map out the inside of his palm like he’s done once, twice, a thousand times when he was just a fragile thing with small bones in his arms, and Kei leans forward to kiss his metallic lips with his warm ones, breathing over the metal in a gesture of - something a little bit more complicated than pity. He knows the word for this emotion but it’s a dream he’s denied to show him for one reason or another, and Kuroo doesn’t press. They’re both entitled to their own little secrets.

 

“I’ll be back soon,” Kei says.

 

He grasps his hand in his claw. In Kei's dreams Kuroo had wide shoulders and an easy smile and messy hair. When he touches him he breathes. When he moves his hands over his chest the pads of his fingers touch the dip and swell of his ribs. Kuroo’s eyes glow blue, and brown, and finally turns dark, his fingers closing upon Kei’s wrist gently. For the first time, in a very long time, he remembers what it was like to touch him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

END.

**Author's Note:**

> follow me @ [fealle](http://fealle.tumblr.com/tagged/My-Fic) for more krtsk fics.


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